Posts tagged "Drake"

This year, the best story in rap -- and the best story in music, and maybe the best story in popular culture in general -- is the three-way dance that Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and Kanye West have been dancing. They've all been throwing huge shadows over rap for years, and they're all entangled with one… More »

The night after Drake's surprise mixtape/album If You're Reading This It's Too Late dropped, reports of a concert film chronicling the early years of his career surfaced. A trailer for the film, which has been promoted under the titles Drake's Homecoming: The Lost Footage and Drake: Homecoming, was released and scheduled screenings in select… More »

We're still sifting through the rubble from the crash landing of Drake's surprise mixtape/album If You're Reading This It's Too Late, and unearthing new gems embedded in the tape is part of the fun. The latest to emerge is "No Talk" by River Tiber, the Toronto-based musician who Drake samples on "No Tellin'." Since… More »

Ronald Coleman, aka OG Ron C, carries on the Houston chopped and screwed tradition that DJ Screw created in the early '90s. Coleman is taking on Drake's new surprise mixtape/album If You're Reading This It's Late, and to preview his slowed-down version -- aptly dubbed If You're Choppin This It's Too Late -- he's shared… More »

We already knew Kanye West was involved with Madonna's new album Rebel Heart, but now it turns out she'll be on Kanye's So Help Me God too. Madonna shared that tidbit with Complex along with news that has plans to collaborate with Drake: "We're gonna work together. Yeah, baby, it's in the… More »

Most of us have better video-watching experiences by falling into YouTube wormholes than we do by keeping up with new music videos as they come out. So with that in mind, let me start off this week's column by introducing you to one. Kelefa Sanneh's great New Yorker article about New York hardcore led me… More »

Last week, Big Sean released his shockingly OK new album Dark Sky Paradise. Its greatest moment is probably "Blessings," the churning event-rap banger that features Sean holding his own alongside Drake and Kanye West. Kanye isn't on the album version, for some reason, but he's in the brand-new video, which Darren Craig… More »

Die Antwoord seemed to be on the verge of climbing to a new tier of celebrity this year with Ninja and Yolandi Visser playing prominent roles in the dystopian sci-fi twee oddity Chappie. Now they'll definitely be more famous, but not for the right reasons; notorious might be a better word for it. Drake and… More »

All the songs chosen for 5 Best Songs this week are, intentionally or not, crushingly self-reflective and introspective. They concern relationships and how we actually relate to others emotionally, not just romantically, as well as how we treat ourselves. But that's a lot to think about on a Friday afternoon. Let's say that they're all… More »

One of the most prominent speculations about Drake's surprise mixtape If You're Reading This It's Too Late is that he only released it as a retail product to complete his four-album contract with Cash Money Records. The idea is that Drake wants to defect from Cash Money along with his mentor, Lil Wayne, who'… More »

From Saturday Night Fever to Purple Rain to The Godfather, movie soundtracks used to be a major factor on the albums chart. Then, all of the sudden, they weren't. This user-made Amazon list of the top 20 bestselling soundtracks of all time includes only two albums released this century, and those -- O Brother,… More »

Drake's surprise "mixtape" If You're Reading This It's Too Late set the record for the most streams of an album in its first week in the United States. The record was released last Thursday right before midnight, and was streamed 17.3 million times in three days according to the Associated Press. Drake actually… More »

Drake's headlining show at last night's Sprite NBA All-Star Weekend concert at Irving Plaza served as something of a victory lap for the successful release of his surprise new mixtape, If You're Reading This It's Too Late, and he brought the other biggest name in rap along to celebrate. After covering Kanye West's two… More »

Drake is calling If You're Reading This It's Too Late a "mixtape," even though he's selling it for money and even though its stream got yanked from Livemixtapes in a matter of hours. Drake is no dummy. If he's really thinking of IYRTITL as a mixtape, he knows better than to give it away for… More »

This time yesterday the Fifty Shades Of Grey soundtrack seemed likely to cruise to an easy #1 debut next week with projected sales of 160,000. Then Drake went and dropped If You're Reading This It's Too Late out of nowhere, and the mixtape/album/whatever is suddenly poised to demolish all comers. Billboard predicts the… More »

"I hope they document what I'm becoming," raps an impossibly young and fresh-faced Drake on "Congratulations," the final song in the preview for a new concert film called Drake's Homecoming: The Lost Footage. The film features footage from his hometown concert in 2009 at Toronto's Sound Academy around the time So Far Gone was taking… More »

Drake has released a surprise mixtape, If You're Reading This It's Too Late. It contains 17 tracks and has features from Lil Wayne, Travi$ Scott, and PARTYNEXTDOOR. Earlier today, Drake shared a short film called Jungle. Missinfo points out that this is probably the mixtape that Toronto Raptors player DeMar DeRozan accidentally mentioned… More »

Y'all ready for 14 minutes of Pensive Drake? This morning, Aubrey Graham posted a new short film called Jungle on his website, and it's an extended mood piece that presumably exists to build anticipation for Views From The 6, his forthcoming album. It's got a lot of slick and apparently-staged images of Drake worrying that… More »

iLoveMakonnen is one of the most compelling artists coming out of Atlanta's newest wave of culture-defying hip-hop, and ever since Drake hopped on a remix of his weekday ode "Tuesday" and signed him to OVO, Makonnen's star continues to rise. Proof? "Tuesday" was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. And while… More »

Most Viewed

As his band traveled through a lightning storm somewhere in the American Midwest, Ariel "Pink" Rosenberg yelled at me over the telephone. It was April 2005, and I was holed up in the spare bedroom of a rented house in York, PA, repeatedly posing pre-prepared interview questions in order to be heard over the noise… More »

Jay Z bought the Swedish company Aspiro's streaming music service Tidal less than a month ago, but that didn't stop him from rolling out his rebranded product today with lots of fanfare from his famous friends. Rumors before the 5PM livestream suggested that Jay's newfangled Tidal would be launched with exclusive… More »

Jay Z is not playing with his big rollout of the streaming service Tidal. After many big stars tweeted their support last night, those same stars have shown up in a new 30-second spot for the service's big relaunch today. In the ad, we see a collection of luminaries -- Jay, Kanye West,… More »

Jay Z wants you to know that Tidal, the Scandinavian high-fidelity streaming service that he bought earlier this month, is a big deal. So he didn't just get some of music's biggest stars to tweet about the service's big relaunch, which is happening today. He got them all to change their social media… More »

Burger Records held their fourth annual Burgerama festival at the Observatory in Santa Ana this past weekend. The two-day fest featured appearances from bands like Together PANGEA, Fidlar, La Luz, Gang Of Four, Public Access T.V. and many, many more. Ty Segall and Weezer were the headliners, and Rivers Cuomo's dad Frank Cuomo made… More »